Personal Mention

John Flaherty has been appointed director and distinguished service professor of Heinz College in Washington, D.C. He succeeds Robert C. Wilburn, who is retiring in July after five years of service to the university. Flaherty has worked at the intersection of public policy, business and politics for more than three decades. His government experience includes chief of staff roles in both the executive and legislative branches working with both Republicans and Democrats. In the private sector, Flaherty has held senior positions in Washington, D.C., public affairs firms and in Wall Street finance, including the Carlyle Group. His foreign policy experience includes participating in official delegations overseas and leading rebuilding teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. Flaherty will teach a class in Heinz College's Washington-based Master of Science in Public Policy and Management program that will bring students in direct contact with Washington-based leaders to learn about the realities and challenges of policy making and how top-level decisions get made. Learn more about Flaherty.

The new Thomson-Reuters list of the world’s Highly Cited Researchers in sciences and social sciences published this week features eight Carnegie Mellon faculty. They are:

President Subra Suresh, materials science and engineering, bioengineering and engineering and public policy;

Neil Donahue, chemical engineering, chemistry, and engineering and public policy;

Ignacio Grossmann, chemical engineering;

Rongchao Jin, chemistry;

George Loewenstein, social and decision sciences;

Gregory Lowry, civil and environmental engineering;

Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, chemistry; and

Spyros Pandis, chemical engineering.

The list includes names of 3,200 highly cited researchers in 21 fields of the sciences and social sciences whose papers were in the top 1 percent by citations for field and year indexed in the Web of Science. The 2014 list was based only on citations in papers published between 2002 and 2012. Details on the criteria and method for creating the list are available here.

Carnegie Mellon's Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) is searching for a new OSP director as a result of recent staff departures. During the transition period, OSP will be led by a three-person management team until permanent leadership is in place. This team consists of Linda Feuster as interim director of OSP; Lynn Young as manager of Contracts and Pre-Award; and Ann Mathias as director of the Office of Research Integrity and Compliance (ORIC). Feuster joined Carnegie Mellon's Office of General Counsel in September 2013 to support OSP; she had served in the same role at the University of Pittsburgh, supporting their Office of Research. Young agreed to add the role of interim manager of Pre-Award to her current role as manager of Contracts. She also served as interim associate vice president for Research and interim director of OSP from September 2012 to August 2013. Mathias will continue in her role as assistant vice president and director of ORIC. She joined Carnegie Mellon in 2008 as the research integrity officer, and in 2010 she became assistant vice president for Research Compliance. In her curent position, Mathias oversees the Institutional Review Board, Institutional Animal Care, Conflict of Interest, Export Control, Research Misconduct and Responsible Conduct of Research Education.

The story of how the women's rights movement began at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention is actually just a cherished American myth. In "The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848-1898," Lisa Tetrault demonstrates that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and their peers — who are credited with founding, defining and leading the women's suffrage campaign — gradually created and popularized the original story. Tetrault, associate professor of history, details how they created the legend during the second half of the 19th century in response to the movement's internal politics as well as racial politics following the Civil War. Read more.

From prohibition and marijuana to gambling and gun laws, Jay Kadane explores how society at times attempts to regulate other people’s lives in his latest blog post for the Huffington Post. Kadane is the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences, Emeritus. Read "The Limits of the Criminal Law."

Obituary:

Carnegie Mellon alumna Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of Kevlar®, the essential ingredient in body armor, died Wednesday, June 18 in Wilmington, Del. She was 90. Kwolek, who earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry from the university in 1946 and an honorary degree from the university in 2001, spent her 40-year career as a research chemist in the Textile Fibers Department at the DuPont Company's Pioneering Research Laboratory. Through her work in the field of liquid crystalline polymers, Kwolek invented the technology for the foundation of the Kevlar® fiber in the mid-1960s. Kevlar®, five times stronger than steel (20 times stronger under water), is resistant to wear, corrosion, fatigue and flame, and is non-conductive. Kevlar has more than 200 applications. It is used to manufacture protective clothing (including fire-safe suits for fire fighters and bulletproof vests for police officers), ropes and cables, plastic reinforcement, industrial fabrics and materials in the aircraft and aerospace field. Learn more about Kwolek.